Summer of the Stone

Phil warned me he was shaving the moustache he’d worn for years, but I didn’t notice he’d done so until three hours later.

“Your face is naked,” I said.

“I was wondering,” he replied, “when you’d finally look at me.”

During those three hours, I had talked to but never looked at him, focused on explaining the yard work I’d done or an email problem. Me, me; not you.

In the middle of the night—the only time these things happen—Phil woke in severe pain. When he couldn’t stand it any more, he woke me and I drove us to the ER at 2 a.m. Phil thought he knew what it was, having been through it ten years ago. My anxiety was high until the Dilaudid kicked in and relief flooded his face.

“I just read William Burroughs was addicted to Dilaudid,” Phil muttered. ER staff had no clue what he was talking about.

Then it was waiting to get tests, waiting to get results. “This will take the rest of the night,” I thought. Indeed it was a kidney stone. They sent us home to wait for its passing. The birds had began to twitter and the sky to blush as we left. Medical emergencies screw with your routine.

“They blast those things, don’t they?” A friend asked.

No, it turns out. It depends on size, type of stone, position. Even in optimal conditions, the method is only 60% effective.

Two days later, we spent the morning in radiology and the doctor’s office. In the examining room, having read three chapters of my novel, unable to sit another minute, I paced while Phil read. “Paced” is too generous. Three steps to this wall, two steps to that. I read a chart that tells you how to measure your pain on a 1 to 10 scale, from “What Pain?” to “OMG, I’m Going To Die.” They have less lively descriptors, involving levels of discomfort. I liked mine better. I paced back to my husband, who grabbed me.

“Let’s smooch,” he said. “That’ll make them show up.”

We smooched and he ran his hands over my body, paused to observe, “No place in this building is anyone else doing this.”

The door opened and we quickly pulled apart. I choked stifling my laughter. The doctor, who I think should have knocked, appeared to notice nothing. Probably couldn’t believe his eyes: old people making out in the examining room? I blame it on the Percocet Phil was taking.

The stone came to rest in a tiny cove in the urethra where it wasn’t blocking business as usual, so the pain went away. Being off pain meds and their nasty side effects was a relief for me as well as for Phil. But the stone showed no interest in passing into the bladder. “It likes it there,” the urologist said cheerfully.

If we were personifying this thing, it better have a name. Harry, Phil decided. Harry liked that quiet corner above the bladder. He got an x-ray weekly for four weeks. “We’re gonna give you frequent flyer miles,” the technician remarked. Harry didn’t budge. Phil waited for pain. If Harry moved again, there’d be pain. That’d be bad. But if he didn’t, they’d go in and get him. That’d be worse. Meanwhile, drinking lots of water and peeing through a strainer.

“Can’t they blast those things?” Someone else asked.

Old saying: if you wanna hear God laugh, tell him your plans. Our summer plans included a trip to Taos, giving the basement a long overdue cleaning, ramping up our exercise program. All cancelled. I believe I do all the housework. Now I grudgingly admitted Phil made significant contributions, noticed by their absence. For weeks, I prepared meals and did dishes too, went to the store for something he might be able to keep down, prescriptions, remedies for side effects. I was both too busy and unable to do anything: a strange limbo.

“Why don’t they just blast it?” The fifteenth person asked.

Finally, “The Procedure.” It required arriving at 6 a.m. Hours later, the urologist came from the operating room flourishing a specimen cylinder. It contained a small dark stone with jagged edges, bigger than I’d expected. “This,” he declared, “never would have passed.”

For an hour after that, the digital display in the waiting room said, “in recovery, sleeping.” Euphemism for unconscious? Something went wrong? If they hurt my husband I’d rip out their eyes. I was a wreck by the time I got in to see him: fuzzy, but fine.

A temporary stent was inserted. On the pain scale, it was pretty much a 5 the whole time it was there. Using my superior descriptors: Damn Annoying. Three weeks later, the stent came out and what began July 10 finished late in September. Finally my husband was back to his old, grumpily good-natured self.

Phil says suffering is God’s way of getting our attention. This was never life-threatening suffering, but it altered our priorities for eleven weeks. In those weeks, I saw our life together as I hadn’t in years and cherished it anew.

But now that’s over. I asked Phil to do something with that stack of books on the floor ages ago and he still hasn’t. He’s so annoying.